This novel is part of a series of retellings of Shakespeare’s work by writers including Margaret Atwood, Howard Jacobson, Jo Nesbø and Jeanette Winterson. The project pays tribute to the enduring relevance of the plays and the infinite possibilities of breathing new life into stories that were themselves reshaped from medieval tales, histories and the literature of the ancient world. New Boy is in the tradition of movies such as 10 Things I Hate About You or West Side Story, or Toni Morrison’s play Desdemona, in which she rewrites Othello as a conversation in the afterlife between the murdered wife and her African nurse Barbary. Chevalier takes what is possibly the most emotionally charged of Shakespeare’s plays and transplants it in time and place.

The new boy of the title is Osei Kokote, the Ghanaian son of a diplomat, who joins the sixth grade late in the school year. This is Washington DC in the 1970s, a time when the partial armour of political correctness had yet to offer protection against blatant racism. Not only does Osei have to navigate new friendships and the brutal politics of the playground, he is also the only black child in the school. From the casual, unexamined bigotry and suspicion of the teachers and the outright hostility of some of his schoolmates, it’s clear that “settling in” is not going to be easy.

Chevalier’s cast of 11-year-old middle schoolers includes the duplicitous Ian, the lovelorn and gullible Rod and the always underestimated Millie, as well as the disapproving authority figure, Mr Brabant. Osei is quickly befriended by golden-haired Dee, a sensitive, imaginative girl who is fascinated by the exotic newcomer – she has eyes, and she chooses him. Chevalier writes her fascination well and there is also a deft examination of the accommodations a boy such as Osei must make wherever he goes. Even at this tender age, he is aware that his very being evokes fear, sometimes disgust. We are told that in his last school he had volunteered to be the goalie during football, conscious that it meant the other boys wouldn’t then have to touch him. Chevalier is delicate in her description of the emotional and mental cost of all this careful avoidance: Osei surveys the playground with “the bullies, patrolling and dominating. And himself, the new boy, standing still in the midst of these well-worn grooves, playing his part too.”

Interrogations of human motivation … Lenny Henry as Othello at the West Yorkshire Playhouse. Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian

Like Othello, New Boy is very much the story of the betrayer; Ian’s playground machinations as he plots to use Rod’s desire for Dee to break up the friendship between her and the new boy are a basic transplanting of Iago’s deceptions in the original. Granted, there are some interesting innovations. Osei’s elder sister, Sisi, who has shed her Africanness in favour of the more appealing radicalised identity of her African American friends, with their exhortations of black empowerment and pride, provides convincing political context. And the strained relationship between the siblings serves to emphasise the isolation and insecurity that lead to young Osei’s ultimate downfall.

But in the end, I found it difficult to believe that I was reading the true lives of 11-year-olds. Setting the action over a single day telescopes the drama in a way that is perhaps too concentrated for a novel; too often the language, in dialogue and in the rendering of the children’s internal thoughts, takes on the distinct intonations of adult conversation. For example, early on Dee attempts to engage Osei in conversation, thinking to herself, “You may be a different colour … but I know you.” This may well be true, but it is hard to believe that an 11-year-old would articulate it in quite that way.

The too faithful adherence to the original is what makes this novel less than successful for me. Shakespeare’s audacious appropriation, or, if you like, reshaping of known stories to make them relevant to a new audience has given us the classics that still reso–nate today. It is not the detail of the plotting in his work that is important but the interrogation of human motivation, the exploration of the range of human emotion and experience. My wish, as I read Chevalier’s ambitious novel, was for a more radical interpretation of Shakespeare’s play. I wanted to believe absolutely in these characters without necessary reference to their originals. New Boy’s direct transfer of the play from stage to page does not allow for a full development of the characters who are summoned into being.

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